


The Vivid Air

by jackmarlowe



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Fighter Pilots, Gen, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reluctant Mentors, Resistance Politics, The Gay Pilot Trope, X-Wing(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-11 16:10:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5632879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wedge Antilles, for all Poe Dameron's childhood imaginings, is no Resistance pilot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> As fond as I am of the Expanded Universe and as rich and important to my childhood as Wedge Antilles' backstory is, I've opted to go for broke and plunge blasphemously into the post-TFA unknown here to give myself some room to invent and move. My Wedge has followed a very different trajectory since ROTJ from either EU or current canon. Apologies to the Rogue Squadron fans, bear with me, etc.
> 
> The title of this story is from a mediocre Stephen Spender poem, but for my purposes is stolen from the title of an old biography of the Lafayette Escadrille, an American fighter squadron in the First World War.

_His memory of the man in the other room is a child’s idea of a soldier, and the irony bites at him sharp._

_They have an inexplicable joke – Poe suspects it has ancient and instinctive origins – that the best fighter pilots are always the opposite of how kids draw soldiers. This is why Testor says she’ll match his score. You’re too tall, she explains, with a grin and a knock on his helmet that does not fit beneath the belly of his machine. Absolutely no hope. You’ll never make Skywalker status with legs like that._

_It's no real wonder that the man he near-remembers, who sits there now, is not taller or broader in the shoulders, and that his face, bruised, is nevertheless free of the savage red blaster-mark Poe could’ve sworn slashed from the corner of his mouth to his cheekbone. He sits in the bare little room with thin hands clasped quietly between thinner knees and round shoulders loose, bird-narrow from his chest to the tip of his nose, eyes half-shut and the dark hair Poe remembers with more authenticity gone grey-streaked. Standing straight in flying boots, Poe guesses, he wouldn’t be a chin over Testor’s head. Maybe there is something to their unofficial rule._

_He hasn’t looked up once, though he's had a rotating audience. Behind the holo-mirror, Poe shifts on his feet._

_Someone in the control room has whispered about some Outer Rim backwater. A debriefer who brought him a caf fifteen minutes ago gave them all a significant eyebrow raise when she came out and kept her mouth deliberately closed as she passed through to deliver her report. Amidst the chatter-whir of headquarters work at Poe’s back, he’s picked out a few of the older folk calling him by his first name. In their undertones, it sounds different from how it’s humming out there on the tarmac already like an incantation, relentless and drum-loud. Poe can’t remember what his parents called him, or if they ever sounded quite like these pilots when they said his name._

_‘Commander Dameron?’_

_He blinks and lets his gaze slip away from the little room opposite to the runner._

_‘Chief wants you out on the deck in two-'_

* * *

The ugliest and oft-claimed unluckiest carbonshit scow in the galaxy has not slammed its hatch on Hosnian Prime's stained hot air more than five minutes past before the planet in question ceases to exist.  
  
This is too gentle a notion: it erupts, a shuddering volcanic bubble out the viewscreen that blares so screaming and awful it sears their faces through layers of Empire-built durasteel with a heat that lingers in the crew's joints. In the red echo of the light that ended the planet, the ship someone with a sense of irony once lazily dubbed the _Venture_ skids and tumbles and shakes off her bolts as if to rid herself of what's already been done. Even in vacuum, beyond the sticking layer of the planet's gravity, she moves like she's been broken. As the lights slam out and leave everyone moaning and screaming for auxiliary power in the belly of the freighter, someone shouts for Wedge.  
  
'Someone get - where's - the _kriffing_ -!'  
  
'Here!'  
  
'You can fly, right? Take her, Jilo got hit - I'm going to go see if-'  
  
And he does, without a single one of the arguments he's spent many careful years crafting occurring to his tongue. Of course he does, and kicks instinctive and stupid at the useless guts of this ancient old slug like she's got a fighter's pedals as he rolls her nonetheless into the shockwave.  
  
The _Venture_ roars animal-visceral as her side takes planet-shrapnel; with Jilo's straps smacking useless against the seat, Wedge jams his bad leg hastily against the control panel and forces his head back against the efforts of the failing G-force dampener to brace himself. Somewhere below in the hold, screams echo up, and beneath the too-familiar chant that's rushed up to batter his brain full he registers the human woman and her two kids they took on just minutes ago - them amongst the rest of the noise. She'd scraped something like her month's rent for a hop across the system with this credit-pinching crew.  
  
The durasteel shrieks, and best thing to do would be - but he forces his hand across the board and knows from the way she's pulsing what Maxor's about to find out in his desperate scramble for the hyperdrive below. Wedge slams the throttle instead - poor substitute - and the _Venture_ shudders to crawl her way to meet him, only he's outrunning a dead planet with a port engine groaning like a dying Hutt and a dangerously shuddering stick and no astromech to serve as a backwards lookout; laborious shouldered barrel, and she's going stern-forward, shoved in a mirror image course as a smouldering asteroid field eats up the black towards her. Wedge grabs the stick between his knees and stomp stomp stomps perilously as he wrestles the straps over his shoulders in one mighty heave - not buckled, close enough - oh _close_ -  
  
A muffled shout from below, and the _Venture_ groans and hops a few paces with a burst of compressor-released power. Wedge blinks stars away from how hard his head's hit the back of the seat: suddenly, there's a view.  
  
He eases back on the throttle and lets the ship turn, but it takes another moment to reach for the urgently blinking auxiliary power light and press the button despite Maxor yelling at him down below.  
  
Hosnian Prime and her children look very little like a Death Star, which Wedge either through low oxygen or adrenaline or actual fact then or now recalls as winking its thousands of power coupling-bright components out one last time against the stars. These not-planets are weeping wounds in the fabric of space, messy and bloody and still core-lit. The asteroid chunks that nearly smashed the Venture between them two breaths ago are now a grainy screen. Wedge finds he can't breathe.  
  
'Oi - you done smashing my kriffing _ship_ , sleemo-'  
  
The captain is a hard-eyed old Berchestian woman, but even she pauses as she drags herself up into the cockpit and sees the sight out the viewscreen. She puts her tattooed hand on the back of Jilo's seat to balance. They stay there in silence up until when Wedge suddenly has to pull the hopelessly twisted straps off himself and gasps at the release.  
  
She drops her chin and looks at him for the first time he's been aboard in these past four months (a long haul job, at his age), thick white brows furrowing folds in the black lines across her forehead. 'Not bad flying,' she observes, 'for an old pirate like you.'  
  
'I'm fifty-one,' he rasps. Idiot. The first thing to occur. He drops the stick so fast the nose dips and the gravity generator attempts a feeble lurching correction.  
  
She snorts. 'You're bleeding.'  
  
And so he is - things are occurring in bursts pierced with red light-edges. He puts his hand to his sticky head, registers the pain, and simultaneously feels his bad leg decide to go numb for his own good. This is, he knows from experience, a small and very temporary blessing.  
  
'Okay,' the captain announces. 'We're gonna have a poke at the hyperdrive-'  
  
'It's gone.'  
  
'We'll see!'  
  
'No.' Wedge hesitates. His tongue feels heavy in his mouth and still tastes vaguely of the thick polluted air they left back on Hosnian Prime. 'Trust me. It's gone.'  
  
She clicks her tongue, disbelieving. 'You tellin' me you're an engineer, now, too, after I spend all this time paying you to do my hauling?'  
  
Wedge shrugs and discovers something else gone sharply wrong below his shoulderblade. The captain watches him dispassionately and thumps her hand on the chair. 'Get a distress beacon going. You're Corellian, ain'tcha - you know anyone in the Resistance? They got people out here, huh? No use asking the fleet, after that.'

He opens his mouth but still can't find air reliably, or the words - to ask how she knows, when his accent is nothing like what it used to be by his own making, or how being Corellian qualifies a radical or a warmonger or both, exactly, when the HoloNet says both these days, only there's nothing being said today with the edges of the New Republic stretching slow and fiery across the empty space before them.  
  
He hesitates too long: the captain turns her back and goes. Wedge takes a breath and then another and has to stuff his fingers in his mouth and curl over the stick to keep from making a sound that might echo down into the hold, where the woman and kids who just lost their Point A and B can hear.  
  
What occurs last, with the stick pressing no less painfully than anything else into his stomach, is this is the first time he's sat in a pilot's seat in twenty-seven years. This unluckiest scow in the galaxy, the New Republic fleet a recent exception, is bizarrely auspicious in this way. He retches.

* * *

_'-if you can tear yourself away,' she adds, a little snide. The fighter jocks have all gone star-eyed in the space of a day, even more so than usual - he can see her thinking it in the twitch of her lips. She's in communications. Wedge Antilles is an anonymous and wholly unimpressive prodigal son._

_'Copy that,' Poe says, and smiles back.  
_


	2. Chapter 2

' _The_ Wedge Antilles! _The_ one!'

'Oh, shab, Snap, you sound like my grandmother...'

'Did she also have great taste and a crush the size of Iego on our beloved forefather?'

'Come on. You've looked up his sim times just-'

'Can a man sleep, guys? Please?'

A token beat of quiet before the whispering starts up again.

'Seriously, though - has anyone talked to him yet-?'

'-shut _up_ , Testor-'

'No, seriously, Poe - have you? Someone's got to do the honours.'

'He's been too busy bedsiding some other _very_ _special someone_ -'

'Oh, _Dameron_ , what would Wedge Antilles say?'

* * *

'I'd like to go,' Wedge says on the second day, when Leia finally comes to visit him. He has lost enough weight in the nearly two weeks adrift his freighter spent adrift, distress beacon unanswered, for the soft corners of his mouth to have vanished and his dark eyebrows to have drawn the rest of his face into something hawkish and alien. It is hard to look at him. What she can recognise of him is in his eyes, but the feeling is mutual: he keeps his gaze stubbornly on his knees.  
  
She's never been comfortable in sickbays. Even the D'Qar breeze, which is achingly like the Alderaan lake country on wet mornings and moves freely through the base in a small and beautiful marvel of engineering, does not mask the peculiar smell of the bacta tanks and antiseptic. It's less unnervingly white than it might be, with friendly, painted walls done by some of the medics and only the odd staff member slipping quietly in and out of the rows of low-lit empty beds, but there's never a second guess as to where they are. Leia wills herself to breathe away a ripple of frustration, smooths her hands over her lap, and leans back in the hard-backed chair she's drawn deliberately close to Wedge's bed. She counts to seven before speaking.  
  
'Have you got a place to go?'  
  
'I really don't see how it's your business.'  
  
' _Wedge_.' He glances up briefly, awkwardly defiant with his sterilised sheets pulled halfway over his crossed knees in a halfway gesture towards rest, though she's been assured he'll be fully recovered with less than a week's worth of nutri-stimulants. Leia wonders vaguely what he looks like now when he's healthy, if he's aged as well as he seems to, and why, when this flash of giddy shaking bitterness is so wild and unnatural in him. She presses her tongue against her teeth and tries to hold his dark gaze until he blinks. 'Please - I know this isn't the way either of us would like it to be. But I'm not going to pretend to catch up with you, if you don't want to, so return the favour here and drop the melodrama.'  
  
'Leia-'  
  
'You're here, one way or another,' she interrupts, but gently. 'Let's talk about that.'

He huffs a little incredulous laugh and pushes his scruffy hair back. 'Are we really-?'

'Yeah, I think so. You saw better than most other people what happened to our legally elected government.'

'I don't follow politics anymore,' he says lowly, in this starvation rasp he's acquired on top of the years since she's seen him last, 'but I got the impression that the New Republic wasn't representing _you_.'  
  
And look where it got them, she's tempted to say, but she will not let Wedge Antilles, of all people, flare her temper. She notices a slight tremor in his right hand that he mashes out on the sheets as if rolling off an itch. 'I don't expect you to be any different from the last time I asked-'  
  
Wedge gives her a tired look - and of course, of course, when they've both put on what could be the years or the roaring onslaught of the past few weeks in the set of her shoulders and the dark bruises under his eyes, and yet-  
  
'-but I'm asking you to really think about it, for right now. The same offer as last time. The circumstances have changed, and you owe it to-' She pauses - _Luke_ , is utterly her instinct, but this is the wrong thing entirely to say and just the possibility of having said it aloud makes her stomach loop '-the friends you still have here. We're not the Rebellion, and, yes, okay, you've kept up with your HoloNet - it's not last time, but it's enough alike.'

He closes his eyes, kicks what Leia knows is his better leg out under the sheet, leans his head back briefly against the backboard with his arms folded tight across his chest. His sharp nose and gaunt cheekbones are blunt and unsettling against the painting behind his bed, a red and yellow sun dappled soft against the rough wall as if by a child.  
  
'What capacity?' he whispers.  
  
'Sorry?'  
  
'I'm not flying.'  
  
'Wedge-'  
  
'Even if - I saw those fighters coming in. I'm a full generation behind,' he snaps, eyes still closed. 'And I don't - I'm sorry. I don't want to talk about this right now.'  
  
'Fine.' She stands and feels the relief down to her knees. 'Think about it. Rest up.'

Wedge opens his eyes, sweat-mussed fringe stark against his pale forehead. He looks faintly embarrassed. 'Leia, I-'  
  
'If you do want that catch up, it can wait,' she says, and steps out to find air that doesn't taste so much like the kind of crisis she doesn't know how to handle.

* * *

The jungle air sticks close enough to his skin to feel the wind of his own passing, and thrum up something in him that only comes from the ground and a close green canopy. D'Qar is not home but Yavin 4 is like this, close enough, that when he finds a slope in the forest he stretches his arms wide and leans on the downhill into something approaching the rawest feral moments of his childhood, his fingertips the S-foils of an X-wing, the engine humming to cracking point at the skin of his throat.  
  
With their constant stand-by, it's not strictly necessary that Poe run every day, or ever - what applies to the rest of the military rarely applies to pilots. Conveniently, it's supposed that he maintains the habit he does out of some higher notion of discipline. Snap gives him a weary look every time he strips out of his flight suit and bounces on the balls of his feet with an eye to the hills - _really?_ \- but otherwise he has them fooled, and relishes it. _Nothing like a good brisk jog to keep the First Order on their toes, kids!_ In reality, he has a strange but consistent moment of claustrophobia every time he finds himself in the cockpit with the engines down, canopy still shut and BB-8 briefly silenced with his disconnect from the nav computer, and it lingers ugly at his hands and feet until he can jump down the ladder and dance it off with a run, or the occasional fuck, or - and this is best yet, sometimes, honestly, still - another scramble slammed on them before he can slip off his helmet.

Poe comes to a fork in the trail nearing the ridge and brushes his dark forelock out of his eyes, enjoying the force of his own breath as he pauses and trots in place. He screws up his face and exhales on a little snorting _whoop_ of relief that's echoed by a local bird he hasn't seen yet, though he's heard it, a few times, this high up on the hill where the low-lying cloud cover takes hands with the branches of the trees and winds temptingly down the trails he knows less well. Poe is cautious here, on planet, in a way he isn't once he hits atmo. Once while out on one of his ramble-briefings - the Dameron walk 'n' talk, the other pilots call them - he knocked a Blue Squadron pilot down in a full flying tackle, unexpectedly, and amidst the indignant yelps and the roar of laughter kicked away the flower for which she'd idly reached. It was a kind of orange, he explained earnestly, seriously, getting a little angry at the amused glances from the gathered circle, that meant slow death by paralysis back home - would you rather guess, when it comes to the jungle? He keeps to his usual route, circling up slow to the rocky outcroppings where, occasionally, he'll catch more than the stretching low murk mist - a lick of sunset flare, orange and abrupt as Yavin flowers, or a recon fighter doing the lazy grumbling barrels he loves through the clouds just to watch them stir.

He'll bring Finn here, he decides as he breaks through the trees to the ridgeline, shrouded in its usual, when he's doing more than walking to and from the mess hall. With this, he kicks up his heels and trots back down the mountain.

Sometimes he pretends that the running really is self-discipline, and doesn't allow himself to think about Finn the whole way down as a kind of experiment of willpower. Now is not one of those times.

The black fighter's fitter glances up as Poe bursts easy through the forest, barely panting hard and grinning even before he's clapped eyes on his ground crew moving slow in the gloom. Lix is a slow-moving Bothan with grey flecks around his muzzle and permanently half-amused yellow eyes; he always looks like he's got the back of Poe's mind exactly in his sights, and he does, or Poe wouldn't have him standing so close and intimate to his machine.

'You okay, boss?'

'You guys still out working?' Poe flicks an impressed eyebrow raise between him and Urah, the rigger, both leaning casual off the fighter's long muzzle. 'Anything wrong?'

'Just putting the nav computer to bed - BB-8 asked for another check.'

'He's fussier than me!'

'Someone's gotta maintain their professional standards around here, boss,' says Lix dryly, and Poe grins at him and with a fond tap for the nose of the fighter, palm to durasteel, trots past out of the dark through the base's blastdoors. He doesn't have to pretend not to know what Lix's talking about. Always have at least three reasons to keep the ground crew you do, his mother said, and that's one in itself.

He knows Finn is likely having dinner with Wedge Antilles again. It's a fact Poe's kept to himself, with the other pilots so starving for an in - it's not quite fair to Finn, he reckons, when he knows him only as Wedge who used to be a public defender on Kessel. Poe couldn't believe it yesterday when Finn dropped this casually into conversation, so loud on his end of the sickbay Poe practically squirmed with second-hand embarrassment and wrapped his hand over the ex-stormtrooper's mouth, with the possibility they might be overheard by the man himself asleep across the room - Wedge Antilles, a _lawyer_ , if it's true. They've collected at least six other stories ranging from rancor trainer to bounty hunter, but this, as far as Poe knows - and if anyone is a consistent ground zero for gossip on this base, it's him - is the only version that's definitely come from Wedge's mouth.

Poe heads to the 'fresher rather than the warm, lit bustle of the mess hall. Time enough yet, if the patients keep their usual routine. Finn calls Rey after dinner and Poe comes by late, now, five nights in a row this week, an odd and precious stretch of time that his squadronmates noticed after two.

He's playing a bit of a long game here, Poe considers as he stands in the 'fresher and spits water idly back, humming a song from the mess. Of course he wants to be the first in, here, to Wedge Antilles - Poe is in most things the competent and benevolent sort of officer everyone wants for a squadron leader, first name terms and everything, but he also likes to _win,_ and being the first to talk to the local hero counts for at least a quarter squadron of downed TIEs. But Finn, he's aware, has found something like a friend out of uniform from the way his eyes light up when he recalls a conversation, and Poe is anxious, so careful, not to tread anywhere near those delicate waters, to ripple uncertainty or his own squadrons' collective enthusiasm into what is private and uniquely Finn's.

Wedge isn't likely to remember him, anyway - he's on even ground with everyone else, and Finn is more important, though for the life of him, Poe's not sure how he's arrived at that conclusion with such speedy and unnerving certainty.

* * *

Wedge has a recurring nightmare where he's run down a mineshaft by the same crowd again and again and again. He wakes the same way every night.

'Wedge - you okay?'

The boy has gotten well enough to stand up and cross the room in the dark to take his hand. They're the only occupants of the sickbay, and part of Wedge can't stand the proximity, the casual, military intimacy with which he peers out the gloom and assumes personal space. _Leave me alone_ , he wants to shout until his throat goes raw, even as his voice is beginning to return to what it was. He recognises every small, horrible, reassuring soldier's gesture in things he did himself when he was that age and has refused to think about since: the touch to the elbow, the neck, the reassuring grip at the back of the head. You are real, you're all right, you are right here. _Leave me be._

'Do you want me to get you anything?'

He settles back tiredly in the dark. He has no real reason to be in the sickbay anymore, and no bed here besides this one - the air presses him tight, makes him pause, forces him to breathe so he can pull his hand free. 'No - thanks. I'm sorry I keep waking you up.'

'It's okay. I'm not sleeping so good either.'

'Yeah?'

'I think I've got the kind of bad dreams you can't wake up yourself up from, you know? So I need the - it actually helps when you wake up.'

Wedge watches him for a moment and sees quite clearly what he needs, though he's suddenly exhausted by the prospect. You're real, you're okay. Finn has told him enough for him to guess if not know exactly how his mind is divided and what disrupts the places in between. He takes another grounding breath and props himself up on an elbow.

'Dreams about real life?'

'Yeah.' Finn lifts his chin a little, solemn in the half-light where he's half-crouched on the edge of Wedge's bed. 'What about you?'

'Not - right now. It's just stupid abstract stuff at the moment. But I know how it is.'

'Can you get rid of them?'

'Not all at once.' Wedge surprises himself: he reaches out and takes Finn's hand again, briefly, and gives it a squeeze. 'But you sleep on it right away, is the trick. Like getting back into a cockpit after a crash,' he adds on impulse, and is rewarded by startled recognition before a reflexive smile, and how this particular comparison does not unsettle his own stomach.


	3. Chapter 3

Wedge can't help it: he gets restless and goes to look at the fighters. They sound different, he tells himself, and he wants to know why, even as something inside his skull turns over in protest and shrieks with every step. Luke always used to say he was obtuse, once he learned what the word meant.

He's been informed the remaining crew of the _Venture_ who stayed on for medical treatment have left despite the offer of jobs and a place, guaranteed, in whatever nebulous form the new Galactic government might theoretically take in the one-day. For now, it's clear the Resistance is still a military operation – the ugly end-of-the-world grey tunic they've given him is evidence enough of that. Rumour was some senators had nasty things to say about Leia and her intentions, the kindest of which being _warmonger_ , at the time of the big split that led to this organisation never intended to be a government in its own right. Privately, Wedge thinks they had cause to worry, and here he is, warmongering with the best of them just by lingering like he is.

Leia's right that he doesn't have another place to go, but of all feeble rationalisations spinning under his raw instinct curiosity about what's sitting out there on the tarmac, this one is pretty far from his mind.

It's a pulsing, sticky day, the concrete near-hissing with gold-blurred steam after a morning downpour, and the X-wings are settled quiet masses looming out of the mist. He pauses within the shadow of the blast doors - not too many people out here, but he's cautious anyway, and helpless in the throes of the little details that practically sit him down then and there. These T-70s have comically large air intake scoops in the crooks of their S-foils: that's what causes the deep booming voices he hears skimming low over the sickbay every evening. He shades his eyes with his hand and examines the nearest, notices how the edges of the wings click perfectly together, sleek and tight and unnatural. Faster, but not so tight manoeuvring in a dive. He hasn't seen what the Empire are flying these days, but - oh, and bites his tongue for this stupid mistake, and for the rest of him being halfway into a cockpit already without having moved-

'It's not the full complement,' a voice behind him says.

Wedge spins to see the handsome kid who comes to visit Finn in the evenings keeping a polite distance some paces from the mouth of the blast doors. Wedge knew he was a pilot long before he saw the orange jumpsuit, but up close he looks positively familiar, broad shoulders and rakish curls and half his weight slung easily onto one foot where he stands with his hands thrust in the pockets of his half-donned flightsuit, the arms of which he’s tied around his waist.

His smile’s a little quick as he walks up, but he meets Wedge's eyes without quite that hungry flash of recognition he's seen on a few others' faces since he's arrived. 'Red Squadron's on the other side of the base. They somehow managed to scrounge up two T-85s.'

'That was lucky!' is all he can think to say.

'Yeah, well. They're museum pieces now, I guess.' He wipes his oilstained palms on the dark front of his under-flightsuit and sticks one out for Wedge to shake. 'I'm Poe Dameron.'

'Wedge Antilles.' They've exchanged already-know nods nearly simultaneously - they raise eyebrows together too, and Poe's grin quirks at the corners. Wedge gives him a more thoughtful once-over – scuffed boots, commander, a pilot who's got his hands in the engine. He likes him for that – careful – and wonders when that came into style. Rebellion pilots never did their own work.

Poe pushes absent oilslick fingers back through his hair and dips his chin towards the touchline. 'Can I give you the tour?'

 _Why_ , viciously _, are you so fucking_ scared. Wedge breathes out and nods. 'If you're not too busy.'

They get not only looks but double-takes on their stroll down the line of fighters painted a deep blue for their squadron, these new X-wings' noses a little too long and unfamiliar in how far they stretch towards one another. Poe's either a squadron leader or the commanding officer, or perhaps both – he's not sure, yet, how many squadrons there are on base, and finds the most obvious questions sticking in the back of his throat soft and unready. But Poe keeps up a chatter that doesn't rely on questions and Wedge keeps in step with his energetic near-bounce, as quiet and unobtrusive as he can be when most of the ground crew is looking at him like Boba Fett’s showed up in a bad mood.

'So we had fourteen machines in Blue until last week, but we had to do a little reshuffling – you know how it is, just to balance things out, and if I'm honest, we had two bad personalities in the same flight who needed a straight-up change, and that reconfigured the entire set-up. I guess you have to sometimes, right - but these two were really knocking wings, literally.' Poe points to the tips of the S-foils scuffed silver from a collision on a blast-scored fighter on their right that's got two teams going through the wiring under her belly; he shakes his head. 'I could've killed them both if I didn't need bodies in cockpits, honestly. None of these guys are as careful as I like, but most of them actually get we're on very limited resources.'

Wedge, half-dazed, wonders what this means – if 'limited resources' has ever meant 'two fighters returned home, one working astromech' here. Not that they've had the time to figure that out.

‘I’m down to reserve pilots in some of the older machines. And if I get asked to rig all these crates for bombing again-’

He nods to the underside of the last fighter, this one black, where a middle-aged Bothan is craning his neck trying to get at the soldered edge of an odd underbelly apparatus with a laser file. ‘You were _bombing_ with X-wings?’

Poe blows out hard through his lips and lifts his hands, and Wedge sees hours of arguments with a certain general flash before his eyes. ‘We haven’t got anything else,’ he explains, doing a half-turn on his heel with a general flourish at the blue fighters. ‘What you see is what you get. General Organa was talking a mean game about getting a squadron of Y-wings out of the New Republic within the week, but.’ He lets out a slow breath and shrugs. ‘If there’s any justice in the galaxy, we won’t be needing bombers for a few months at least.’

Poe pauses at the end of the line, hesitating hopefully with a glance over. Wedge abruptly realises he’s just done his first officer’s inspection in decades. He pauses with his tongue on the roof of his drying mouth, tries to remember what someone says. The heat comes up from the tarmac to his cheeks.

‘Dameron…’ he says slowly, turning in Poe’s same described arc to take in the fighters.

‘My dad’s Kes Dameron. Shara’s husband.’

Wedge pauses. ‘Is Shara…?’

‘She died. A few years after things settled down.’

He really looks at him then, sharp – the curve of his eyes, the angle of his jaw, the way he wears his hair like military discipline’s never had to apply. The young man’s familiarity blurs into something more intimate, dangerously approaching a memory: _it’s got to look good in a helmet_. Shara Bey, who mad-laughed over the comms when she had something in her sights.

Poe smiles, a little involuntary, and folds his arms tight across his chest. ‘Sorry. I assumed someone would’ve – well, I don’t think she was in your squadron.’

‘I haven’t really-’ Wedge, to his horror, feels the jungle heat closing up his throat, and swallows fast. Poe watches him dark-eyed and rapt, tucking his chin to his chest. The ground crew are good – the two on the black fighter behind Poe duck seamlessly towards the other end of the line like they’ve been Force-touched, when Wedge knows they’ve had an eye on their pilot every breath they’ve stood here. He makes himself meet Poe’s gaze evenly. ‘I don’t know what Leia told you, Commander, but I still don’t know what I’m doing here yet.’

Poe nods, as though this is the most natural thing in the world to say amidst what Wedge knows is a flurry of deadly military activity even on a lazy day like this.

‘I haven’t made it my business to find out – I’m sorry.’

‘She didn’t used to talk about things much,’ Poe says lightly, ‘but she mentioned you a few times. I think she introduced me to you, actually, when I was really little. Three or four.’

Wedge blinks. ‘Luke was there?’

‘Yeah. Mom said you were the best pilots in the Rebellion, and I said _she_ was in front of the both of you. I think I was embarrassed about it for about fifteen years.’

‘She came pretty close, if there was such a thing,’ Wedge murmurs. He used to hate the stock version of this sentiment with a real violence when he said it to parents and partners, helpless, helpless over holo-message with his fists clenched out of sight and an awful hollow feeling in his gut. _A good pilot, a good buddy_. These were entirely empty phrases even for people who loved flyers, but here this rests so abrupt and easy between them on the jungle steam coming up over their boots. They watch each other for a moment, careful, heads tipped back in that identical peculiar long-sight peer. Poe slides his arms quiet to his sides.

‘Do you want to come for a walk with me?’

‘Did Leia put you up to this?’ Wedge asks, but wryly – he suddenly feels relaxed in a way he hasn’t since getting out of bed. Poe’s grin flickers back.

‘If I promise not to ask a single question about the Death Star, or the Rebellion, or what Luke Skywalker ate for breakfast-?’

‘ _Oh_ – is that really what they’re all-?’

‘We’re a little hero-starved around here,’ Poe says, half-serious, but he laughs at Wedge's slight recoil from the word, and when he taps his shoulder to nod him towards the trees beyond the landing pad, Wedge follows.

* * *

Leia spots him across the mess that evening and almost doesn’t want to interrupt, though she’ll give a good half the planet not to be hosting the Hosnian Prime Junior Vice Minister for Trade, still slightly hysterical despite having been out-of-system when the New Republic met its end. She buckles down to wait and watches surreptitious with her best politician’s face on as the Junior Vice Minister tells her again about having had a vision about a planet exploding days before it happened – did Leia think she might be Force-sensitive?

They sit on opposite ends of the mess: junior officers block her view occasionally with salutes and reports that double as blessed distractions, delivered at the dinner table as they’ve been ordered to do. Wedge sits beside Poe Dameron, both strikingly out of place – he’s old enough to be the gaggle of pilots’ father, with the exception of Nien Nunb, and his hair and the deep lines at the corners of his eyes stand out – and at the same time so easy in how he leans into the flow of conversation, the natural raucousness of the pilots, that were he wearing orange with the rest of them she doubts she’d pick him out. This is the first time she’s seem him smile, fleeting and often ducked into his soup, but there all the same. There are a few jealous glances from younger people at other tables, but, as with most things, the fighter jocks get the first go.

‘Do you think,’ the Junior Vice Minister inquires, tremulous and twitching her green lekku anxiously over her shoulder, ‘we’ll see a new Senate instated by the end of the month?’

Leia sighs and wipes her mouth. ‘I can’t speak to that right now, Tariss. As I’ve said, we’ve still got ground forces engaged with the First Order in three systems.’

‘But surely you can’t be speaking in just a military capacity, General, with your political experience!’

‘I can’t play in both smashball courts,’ Leia says, a little distracted – Dameron’s bent his head in close, serious conversation with Wedge, holding out a hand to halt Jessika Pava’s eager rebound lean. His still shoulders say he’s listening intently.

‘Why not?’

A small flash of – not anger, but something, that she breathes away as Luke taught her to do longer ago than she can comfortably guess. She glances back at the Twi’lek and frowns. She’s almost used to having a very exclusive calibre of politician around her, but this accidental guest is a reminder of what most of the Senate is like, or was.

‘I know you’re too young to remember the Empire, dear, but I shouldn’t have to tell you why I can’t wear this uniform and pretend to weigh in on political matters. We’re leaving the re-ordering of the Republic to people like you.’ Force help us, she adds to herself.

This wasn’t quite the line last time and she knows it – Tariss opens her mouth, but an orderly bobs up and saves Leia the semantics.

‘General – urgent news from Sector 4.’

‘Go ahead.’

The boy’s gaze flicks uneasily; he’s new. ‘Eyes-only, ma’am.’

‘Would you excuse me?’ Leia says, and leaves before the answer comes.

* * *

The news is worse than she expected, so the conversation with Poe Dameron later that evening goes something like this, eventually:

'Can I speak-'

'If you say _freely_ , Poe Dameron, I swear-'

'- _candidly,_ ma'am-?'

'You may not.'

'General - please, _hear me out_ \- I can't sanction this. I can tell you right now they'll be outnumbered to the point they might as well not be there, understaffed - I'm down to one rigger shared between two pilots, in two cases! - and fucking - sorry - strategically useless. You want infantry reinforcements here, not a single fighter squadron. And we haven't got anywhere near the number of the officers to go anywhere, anyway.'

'They're not your X-wings, Commander, and don't tell me how to do my work on the ground. I realise it's not been ideal handling both squadrons at once, but your flight leaders-'

'They're my people! They're - some of them are trainees.'

Briefly, she thinks, if she from thirty years ago could see herself now, standing in the darkened ops room with this earnest young man who's asking her not to send eighteen-year-olds into combat. She suddenly feels tired and heavy.

'We'll get you some more pilots,' she says. 'And machines.'

'Where from?' Poe is wild-eyed and sleepless, hair tousled and a restless pace driving him up and down the chart table. She's pulled him from his late-night visit with the stormtrooper down in the sickbay and the anxiety's stretched down into his taut fingers. 'It's just me out here, General.'

'We'll see about that.'


End file.
